I ordered the limited edition of Halo 3. You know — the one that everybody was reporting they had problems with. Apparently, the brainy marketing or design people who thought up the game box with the DVD holders, which were supposed to secure the discs inside, forgot to check if the bloody things really worked or not.
The result of the defective hubs was that the discs would jar loose during shipping and would rattle around inside the box while self destructing by scratching against the very retaining hub that was supposed to hold the disc securely.
I bought the LE of Halo 3 through Amazon.com because I had a $25 coupon. The package arrived yesterday and I was hoping against hope that my edition wouldn’t be marred. The first thing I did was to shake the game box. Unfortunately, what I heard was not silence, but a couple of disks bouncing around–free as birds.
"Uh oh," I said to myself. I opened the case and saw both of the disks scratched, mauled and damaged as if they had been in a cat fight. The term, "scratched," is way too generous a term for what I saw. Calling the disks, obliterated, is much more accurate.
Now I have to send the damaged disks to Microsoft and wait a painful 2 weeks for the swap. The "good" news is that I don’t have to pay a cent for the switch. The bad news is that I have to wait 2 weeks. But wait, there’s more. Only a few days before my limited edition showed up, my Xbox 360 came up with the red rings of death. So now, I have to send that back too. Is this a conspiracy or something? I don’t know.
This leads me to my main point. If you are a major company depending on your customer base for your livelihood, wouldn’t it make sense to make sure that your products are the best possible? How hard is it to make a game box that holds DVDs in place? Aren’t people being paid to do this sort of thing? And I might add, being paid lots of money to do so.
I can image all these engineers, marketing specialists and packaging designers with their MBAs and long resumes spending months in developing the box for the limited edition version of Halo 3-but they couldn’t put together a package that could hold a disk from jarring loose that only weights in at a few ounces? Something is wrong here.
Although Microsoft has extended the warranty of my Xbox 360 and is offering a free replacement of my Halo 3 disks, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth because I have to pay the price of waiting for a company to fix problems that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.
Some heads need to roll at Microsoft because these fiascos aren’t just hurting Microsoft’s reputation, it’s costing them BIG bucks.
If anything, that should cause them to get their act together…at least I hope it will.
